And Death Hath Done Apart
by Sith Droideka
Summary: Oberon was defeated, letting Asuna free from the virtual world after over two grueling years. She awoke expecting her savior to meet her in the hospital, but Kazuto was nowhere to be found...


Asuna woke up. She was in a hospital bed. She could feel the hospital sheets, she could barely see an unfamiliar ceiling under the rim of her NerveGear. It was dark outside, and inside. A machine beeped softly. She tried to move, but she couldn't. She had no strength. Slowly, she inched up her pillow and looked down at herself. She was thin, very thin. She became aware of a tube going down her throat, of wires and cords covering herself. She couldn't swallow, she could barely move her fingers, and her legs and arms couldn't leave the bed without them shaking. This was nothing like Aincrad or Sugou's gilded cage.

Still, there was hope. Kazuto released her, Kazuto would find her and be there to reunite. She knew he had to know where she was- Sugou had taunted her over it, after all- so she would wait for him to arrive.

And she waited.

A nurse arrived shortly afterwards and removed the NerveGear and the feeding tube, on Asuna's nearly inaudible request. When Kazuto arrived, she at least wanted to kiss him- a tube in the way would interfere with that.

And she waited.

And she waited.

And she waited some more.

The nurse arrived- it must've been several hours- and Asuna tried to ask about Kazuto, if a black-haired boy about her age had shown up at the hospital. The nurse shook her head and set up a machine to move Asuna's arms and legs for her. Then she disassembled the machine and left the room again.

Asuna waited for the nurse to arrive again, too afraid of returning to the cage to risk going to sleep. It didn't matter that the NerveGear had long been removed from the room. All that mattered was that she wanted to see no more of Sugou's handiwork.

When the nurse arrived, she whispered another question about Kazuto, and the nurse turned away from Asuna and told her that she was sure that her boyfriend would arrive in the morning. So Asuna instead croaked out a request to watch TV. The nurse nodded, put the television on, and left the remote on the bed so that Asuna could change the channel.

It was set on some kids' channel, but Asuna switched it to the news. "-pital's parking lot. The incident occurred around midnight and police are reporting that the search for the murderer is still ongoing, although his name and identity has been established from hospital security recordings: Nobuyoki Sugou, director of the RECTO company's research division. Police estimate that-"

Asuna shut the television off.

Now a different nurse was tending to Asuna. The news said it was 3:37 am, and that must've been about an hour ago when the nurse arrived; he chided Asuna for staying awake so long, and did not answer Asuna when she asked about the parking lot.

Finally, she drifted off to sleep, but it was a nightmare: she was back in the gilded cage, dressed like Titania, and Oberon entered and walked up and tore off her clothes, just as he had done in the darkness against Kazuto, and Kazuto showed up to save Asuna… and was torn to pieces by another Oberon, and then another, and another, and another, holding all manner of weapons, all attacking Kazuto, who no longer looked like his elf persona but like Kirito in his casual wear, and Oberon began to molest her as she was forced to watch and then he was about to kill her-

She woke up, covered in cold sweat. Her father was sitting by the bed, snoozing. It was light outside, the sun was shining in. She reached for the remote- slowly, carefully- and turned on the television. But there was no news.

Yet somehow, she could feel that sick feeling in her stomach that told her what had already happened.

Her father awoke, and she asked him about Sugou. "He's with the police, now," her father said, and he said no more. Asuna pressed on him, demanded information, but her father merely wiped his face with a handkerchief and rose to tell her mother.

Between her father leaving and her mother arriving, the nurse arrived again. "You'll be seeing a therapist," he noted while he set the machine up again. When it was done, he left the room.

The news story turned to what Asuna had feared. "In today's top local story," the anchor said, "a local schoolboy was stabbed and murdered by former research division director of RETCO, Nobuyoki Sugou. The boy's reason to visit the hospital at so late at night was to meet with his girlfriend who had recently woken up at-"

Asuna had been so transfixed by the news story that she didn't notice her mother taking the remote and switching the television off. "I'm glad you're awake," she said, "you don't need to watch that-"

"Kazuto-"

"Never mind what happened, we're getting the best psychiatrist we can-"

"He died, didn't he..."

Her mother twitched, and when she nodded Asuna felt a combination of anger and sadness welling up in her. "Don't worry, Asuna," her mother said, as if to placate her, "Sugou will-"

"Who arranged it?" whispered Asuna, "who made the marriage deal…"

"It was your father, of course," her mother said. Asuna felt the anger coursing through her. She knew her mother had a hand in it, she could still remember it… to just lie like that, to deflect the blame...

She wished she could scream, but she couldn't. She could only say, "get out."

Her mother looked at her, as if she hadn't heard what Asuna said. "What was that?"

"Get out," Asuna said. Her breathing was starting to be harsher, deeper, as she tried to get the anger out. The anger at Sugou, at her parents, at the hospital security, at _herself_, for not freeing herself faster in the research room…

She pressed the call button with all her strength, and the nurse arrived. Asuna's mother was simply staring at her daughter. "Yes, Miss Yuuki?"

"Get her out," Asuna said, "get that woman out, she arranged it, she liked him, get her out, get her out, get her out-"

The nurse nodded and began to pull Asuna's mother out of the room, while Asuna simply sobbed "get her out" over and over again.

For the rest of the day, no one came to her hospital room besides the nurses. The remote was taken away and the television turned off. So Asuna simply stared at the ceiling, reliving her experiences with Kirito, from meeting him to "marrying" him to saving and losing Yui to dying with him to reunifying and now…

Now…

Her father arrived after another machine-induced work-out. He did not say anything about her mother. He apologized for being a poor judge of character, and read out a news article about the incident. He confirmed the victim, and left the room.

The tears had dried up, and so had the anger. She had considered praying, but she knew that no prayers would bring back the dead. So all she was left with… was her sadness.

Months passed, and Asuna could barely walk. She was at Sugou's trial, and watched blankly as he was carted off to a life sentence in prison for murder, kidnapping, attempted rape, and human experimentation. She looked away every time he looked up. She also attended Kazuto's funeral, a traditional affair with many attendees also from SAO. People like Kline or Agil expressed their condolences, as did Kazuto's sister Suguha, but for the most part she was left alone, the grieving widow. At her request, Kazuto was being buried with a wedding ring, whose twin she now wore. She had it fashioned after the in-game one from Aincrad.

The therapists tried, they really did. It wasn't their fault that Sugou had killed Kazuto and denied him his life, and her life. She wished that she was in America, that Sugou could be executed for what he did to Kazuto. But she wasn't. Physical therapy went well, and mental therapy was shaky. She came to terms with his death, although she refused to give up the ring or visiting his grave every week to "talk" with him. She knew, on some level, that her mother was right about her obsession with Kazuto, that she wasn't _really _past it, but Asuna still couldn't forgive her.

It was no longer about Sugou. Her father had been at fault too, but she had forgiven him. It wasn't his fault, or her mother's fault, that Sugou was the utmost gentleman around them. But it was her mother's fault that she kept parading well-to-do cousins in front of her at parties, always told her interests and always interested in "getting to know you". But they would inevitably be turned away by Asuna, and when she confronted her mother after the fourth boy, Asuna's mother had snapped, "I'm trying to make a better life for you! You're still so wrapped up over that boy that you're letting your life slip away! If you won't find a husband, then _I _will!"

Asuna had responded by brandishing her left hand and shouting, "I _had _a husband, and you've done nothing but try and make sure I forget him! You-you liked Sugou, and now you're trying the same thing all over again!" and she turned and ran out of the kitchen and into her bedroom. She turned her phone off so that she could be miserable in peace, and fell asleep.

When she woke up, her wedding ring was gone. She panicked, searched her entire room, and then the path down to the kitchen, and interrupted dinner. But when she asked her mother, she merely said, matter-of-factly, "you were too fixated. I removed it for your own good."

Her brother and her father looked at each other, and then hastily retreated from the table, leaving her mother to calmly sip steaming tea, even as Asuna stormed over to the table. And, in a fit of rage, whipped the tea out of her mother's hands, threw it in her face, and ran out the door crying. She took out her bicycle and rode to the graveyard, where she spent the next hour sobbing at Kazuto's gravestone.

Suguha found her and walked her and her bicycle to the Kirigaya residence. Mrs. Kirigaya made her a bed in Kazuto's old room (now a storeroom with some of his old stuff collecting dust on the walls), and she spent the night there. Her father came by the next morning, to apologize to Asuna and return her ring on behalf of her mother, but the damage was done. Her relationship with her mother was fragile at best for the rest of her life, but at least another boy never harassed her again with "inside information", and her mother no longer brought up her weekly visits to the grave.

As time went on, she visited less and less. By the time that college arrived, she visited only on his birthday, Christmas, and Valentine's, partly to leave food that she knew some animals would eat instead, and partly to tell him all the events since her last visit. She would spend hours talking to the silent grave. The graveyard workers had been surprised that such a pretty young lady spent Christmas in the snow, eating a slice of cake in front of a snow-covered marble slab, but they learned to accept it. Her family and friends had, and even her therapists had given up talking her out of it.

She went to America for college, and reentered the virtual MMORPGs for the first time in years with her new friend Shino Asada, who left for America due to its lack of stigma for using guns. The VMMORPG, Gun Gale Online, was fun, but Asuna eventually had to stop because she would constantly get the feeling that Kazuto would return… and he never would.

She graduated and returned to Japan to be near Kazuto's grave again. She revived contact with some old friends from SAO, and kept up with Shino and her new job in Texas, and began to work at a telecom company. She dated some, but she never got far before she felt too guilty, or felt that the other person just didn't compare to Kazuto, so she broke it off. And that was assuming they didn't find out that she had been in SAO- when they did, they usually broke it off themselves.

Once a year, on Kazuto's birthday, Asuna visited the grave and told him everything that had happened. She would stay there, for hours on end, from a young adult, to a middle-aged woman, to an elderly woman sitting in front of the grave of her beloved. Earthquakes, tsunamis, wars, and depressions had swept through her long life. She had never married (or was it remarried?), although she did have a robotic child thanks to Yui, rediscovered and given life in an android shaped like a middle-aged Japanese woman. Yui would go with her to visit her father, and then she would go about her life, yet another person in a long line of new, artificial life.

Asuna was now the president of a major corporation's subsidiary, and a frequent target of slander for her support of the death penalty, abolishing arranged marriages, and loosening anti-gun laws and stigma. Her father, mother, and brother were dead, and her nephew and niece-in-law already had a teenaged son. Yui fell in love and moved out of the Yuuki household, talking about egg donations and artificial wombs so that she could have a child of her own.

It was on Kazuto's 94th birthday that Asuna visited his grave for the last time. She knew her time was running short, that soon she would be bedridden. She had already told her doctors that she wanted to move on. With consent from Suguha, she had switched out Kazuto's gravestone with one for her and him and bought the plot next to his, what had once been a path now her future burial ground. She kneeled in front of his grave for the last time and told the story of her last year on Earth.

"Kazuto," she said at the end of it, "Ki-kirito-kun… it's been a long time, and I know you've had to endure this old woman's prattling for… for over seventy years now, and I just want you to know that… that I'm dying, I know I am, and I've tried to make the world a better place. Yui, she's… she's going to get married soon. It's hard to believe, but there are people who'd love a computer program now. She's going to have a child, some… new technology. And she looks like she did in Aincrad, our little girl all grown up, although I don't know if she'll ever grow older…" She chuckled, but Kazuto's grave said nothing. She was used to that. "I… I brought you something," she said, and she pulled a package from her side and placed it in front of the grave. "I made a replica of your old sword… Lizabeth, you remember her?, she made it for me. She's dead now…" The grave still said nothing. "I just wanted to say, I'm glad I met you, and I'll be moving on now. I love you, and if- if there is a heaven, I'll see you soon…"

As she rose to leave, she felt something- someone- pull her into a hug and a kiss and tell her, "I'll see you soon, Asuna. I love you too." For a moment, she thought she saw Kazuto- an older one than the one she knew, but still a recognizable young man smiling at her, and then he vanished. She smiled at him and walked away, tears stinging on her eyes.

She had her last name legally changed to Kirigaya a week later and died with Yui and Suguha at hand the next night. Some in the press lauded her death, and others weeped, but Asuna died with a smile on her face. After 77 years, she was finally reunited. Her body was laid to rest in the world, and with a kiss she joined Kazuto in the afterlife, young and together again.

* * *

**A/N: This story was inspired by a comment on TvTropes about what if Kazuto/Kirito was killed by Sugou in the parking lot. I thought it was an interesting idea (come for trying to find fan rage, leave with a story idea) and wrote this up.**

**For the record, I don't actually like Fairy Dance except for the real-world Sugou vs Kazuto confrontation and the reunion in the hospital.**


End file.
